The Folk Hero in Modern American Drama

Abstract

WHEN JONATHAN WALKED OUT ON THE STAGE of New York's Park Theatre in 1787, he began a procession of folk characters that has never ceased to pass before the footlights of the American stage in astonishing variety and number. This first stage Yankee became the progenitor of a multitude of rustics, backwoodsmen, minstrels. cowboys, and bandits with whom generations of audiences have identified themselves delightedly and volubly. From Jonathan and Solon Shingle to Joe Hill and Jesse James is a long road, a road which one is tempted to say leads from fantasy to realism and back again to fantasy. Not all the folk creations of the American mind have been successfully transplanted to the stage. Major Jack Downing and Hosea Biglow and Sut Lovingood never became the protagonists of plays which enjoyed long runs and appealed to a variety of audiences. But after Royall Tyler gave birth to Jonathan, and Joseph Jefferson animated Rip Van Winkle for almost half a century, modern dramatists seized on John Henry and Paul Bunyan, on Roy Bean and Johnny Appleseed, expropriated them from the popular imagination, and made them into interesting stage figures. The folk hero, naive but shrewd, earthy or whimsical, sometimes voluble and sometimes aphoristic, has become one of the few American contributions to the world's dramatic gallery and in so doing has remained as autochthonous as he is a personality.